Sexual abuse by superintending staff in the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum: medical practice, complaint and risk.

The nineteenth century witnessed a great shift in how insanity was regarded and treated. Well documented is the emergence of psychiatry as a medical specialization and the role of lunatic asylums in the West. Unclear are the relationships between the heads of institutions and the individuals treated within them. This article uses two cases at either end of the nineteenth century to demonstrate sexual misdemeanours in sites of mental health care, and particularly how they were dealt with, both legally and in the press. They illustrate issues around cultures of complaint and the consequences of these for medical careers. Far from being representative, they highlight the need for further research into the doctor-patient relationship within asylums, and what happened when the boundaries were blurred.

Who were his peers? The social and professional milieu of the provincial surgeon-apothecary in the late-eighteenth century.

The social standing of the surgeon-apothecary cannot be determined by reference to professional life alone, yet few such men left social documents. The lower middling sort was typically reticent about evaluations of their own social position in any source genre. This article uses a unique archive, and the concept of community connectedness, to investigate the status of Thomas Higgins, surgeon-apothecary and man-midwife of north Shropshire. Higgins embodied the traditional practitioner who relied on local knowledge and his 'friends' for advancement, in contrast to alternative modes of rising professionalism. He was demonstrably a trusted man at the heart of his home town, but his reliance on the 'partiality' of his neighbors brought him into conflict with his colleagues.